The Friday Report for January 15, 2016

This is one of the two images I posted on my Instagram page this week. 

(I know I SAID I'd only do one per week, but sometimes I need to make more art!)

This week I had a lot of Life Business to attend to. I AM NOT A FAN OF LIFE BUSINESS. But it has to be done. There's a great big oak tree in front of my house, looming over my roof, which is missing a large patch of the outer bark that's supposed to be on the trunk, and it has dead branches and a tendency to drop chunks of dead branch even when there's hardly any wind blowing. I live in the Midwest. We are kind of KNOWN for wind, and I've been nervous about that tree for several months now, without being able to do anything about it. The rule about oak trees, around here, is that they are not to be trimmed or cut down in the warmer times when the healthy oak trees might catch their diseases. We had pretty warm weather (for Wisconsin) into December, but now that it's well and truly cold I can get the tree, and its buddies that need trimming way back, dealt with. 

Between meeting with the tree guy and dealing with a long list of additional Life Business Items, including car issues, the week has been one of those blink-and-it's-gone weeks. I wrote a little bit and expanded the outline of my new story a little bit, but I'll need to do a lot more of both next week if I'm to reach the goal I set up with my writing buddy: 3,000 words, otherwise known as half of the rough draft of this story.

My projects for the week:

Writing: I'm up to a little over 200 words on the Weird West story, so I will have to basically lock myself in all next week and work on that at my highest intensity setting.

Reading: 

• The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

January's Other Project: Setting up my new office. This week I pulled off some of the painter's tape around the newly-painted walls, which is the kind of annoying little job I could avoid forever, because my messy painting makes the tape hard to remove. I am a tidier painter when I don't use the tape! But this time I was nervous about the prospect of intense deep ocean blue paint getting all over the place, so I bowed to my fears and taped around the edges. I'm sure there's a lesson in there. I also assembled a small storage cabinet. There's still a lot left to do.